|
Scaling IP Call Recording and Monitoring to Fit the
Small Business
Call recording and monitoring can improve customer service, employee
productivity and meet regulatory obligations. With innovative solutions
expressly designed for small businesses, call recording is now affordable
and easy to use.
By Amy Larsen DeCarlo
Convergence appeals to cost-conscious organizations,
but the applications that IP telephony helps businesses set in motion makes
convergence truly compelling. IP telephony puts functionality that was
prohibitively expensive or too complex to implement in the TDM world within
easy reach of most organizations. Small businesses are particularly eager
to jump on the convergence bandwagon to tap into capabilities like number
portability and converged conferencing.
Add call monitoring and recording to the growing list
of attractive business applications that small companies can deploy because
of IP telephony. Telrex
CallRex brings affordable and easy-to-use call monitoring and recording
to ShoreTel IP phone systems. As a result, small and medium-sized companies
can use call monitoring and recording to improve employee training, speed
dispute resolution, meet regulatory obligations, and increase
productivity—and they can do so for a fraction of the estimated $1,000 per line average cost
in the circuit-switched world.
For the Record
"It is exciting to see call recording become another standard business
application made possible by voice over IP," says Bob Cordes, vice
president of product management and marketing at Telrex.
Cordes notes monitoring employee communications with customers is
proven as a highly effective way to better train employees and keep them
working at their optimal level by providing them with a record of
how they interact with customers. Now even the smallest companies – Telrex
CallRex Express is geared to businesses with between five and 15 phones at
a given site, while Telrex CallRex Professional is designed for larger
companies—can apply IP call recording to help improve customer service and
meet other organizational goals.
"This
really allows small business owners to keep their finger on the pulse of
the organization," Cordes says. He adds that small business owners can
monitor any employee within the organization to make sure they meet all of
the customers' needs and work at their most productive level.
Beyond the obvious benefits of helping companies
improve their output and customer service, call recording is a sure-fire
way to help companies resolve potential disputes. Cordes says having a
recording of a call during which a customer placed an order or made some
other contact with company gives businesses incontrovertible evidence they
can use to settle a dispute.
Call recording can also help companies prevent fraud.
"An insurance company might want to flag a call for a particular claim
number," Cordes says. "They might have multiple calls out to a
claimant asking him to describe what happened. They can later pull up all
of the calls related to that claim to see if there are discrepancies in the
claimant’s story that would trigger a fraud investigation."
A Tightly Integrated Solution
Telrex CallRex records
calls unobtrusively by copying audio packets from the network using passive
packet sniffing technology. The Telrex solution relies on a
Telephone Application Programming Interface (TAPI) integration to access
call-control connection information in ShoreTel version ShoreTel 6.0 and
6.1 phone systems to produce a clean and accurate recording of a call from
start to finish.
"What is nice about the integration with the
ShoreTel phone system is that we don’t directly inject ourselves into the
call flow between the phones and the IP PBX," Cordes says, which means
no interference and no performance hit.
CallRex runs on a Windows server, and connects to the
network between the ShoreTel IP PBX and the phone. To know when to record a
call, CallRex examines packets on the network and associates the IP address
with the phone extension of a particular employee whose calls are being
monitored.
Figure: Telrex CallRex is a software-based call monitoring and recording
solution that's integrated with ShoreTel's IP phone system. CallRex sits
between the IP PBX and the phone, which ensures that calls are recorded
without interference or draining performance.
A supervisor
can listen in on any call from the manager’s console. With CallRex,
managers can spot-monitor calls, record all calls, or record calls on an
as-needed basis. Supervisors can flag recorded calls for future review,
adding notes or call descriptions to the recording, which makes it even
easier to find the right call recording later using CallRex’s search
capability.
Broad Appeal
Cordes says CallRex has a cross-industry appeal, attracting small
businesses that run the gamut from financial services firms and healthcare
concerns to golf courses and building services and construction companies.
For many organizations, recording customer calls meets legal or regulatory
obligations.
"It is striking to see how every company can
really benefit from call recording," Cordes says, noting that IP
telephony will drive its adoption, particularly in small businesses.
|
